Officials feared being called racist if they spoke out against Asian or Pakistani grooming gangs.

It added: “Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all play a part in a collective failure to properly deter and prosecute offenders or to protect children from harm”.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Perpetrators [were] walking free because no one joined up the dots or because the law protected them instead of the victims that they had exploited.”

Ms Cooper apologised, on behalf of the Government, to victims of the grooming gangs scandal.

She said: “To the victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering you have suffered and the failure of our country’s institutions through decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe.”

Officials dodged the issue of ethnicity among the groups of sex offenders for fear of being called racist, even though available data showed suspects were disproportionately likely to be Asian men, the Home Secretary told the House of Commons.

Speaking as a review of grooming gangs by Baroness Casey was published on Monday, Yvette Cooper told MPs: “While much more robust national data is needed, we cannot and must not shy away from these findings, because, as Baroness Casey says, ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities.”

She said Baroness Casey found examples of organisations “avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions”.

Ms Cooper said: “These findings are deeply disturbing, but most disturbing of all, as Baroness Casey makes clear, is the fact that too many of these findings are not new.”

Currently ethnicity is only recorded for around 37% of suspects.

The report found that: “The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more. Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years.

“Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination.

“Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation.

“In a vacuum, incomplete and unreliable data is used to suit the ends of those presenting it. The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with white perpetrators when that can’t be proved.”

Baroness Casey said there is “evidence that men of Asian ethnicity” are over-represented as “perpetrators” in grooming gangs.

She added: “Taken together with the significant number of prosecutions of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds evident in local reviews and prosecutions across the country, this should have, and indeed still does, warrant further examination.

“Justice might also have been better served in the past if children’s services, the police and other criminal justice agencies had applied fewer stereotypes and judgements to the victims of child sexual exploitation, to have given them the protection and safeguarding response they deserved instead of treating or seeing them as complicit adults.

“The defensive behaviours of organisations responsible when challenged on their handling of child sexual exploitation has added to the misery and suffering of victims and further hampered efforts to tackle child sexual exploitation more effectively.

“Resistance and reluctance to review and acknowledge past mistakes, apologise and take action is unnecessary and leaves wounds unhealed.

“The result of all of this has been a blind-spot in the way institutions have addressed child sexual exploitation, with too many of the most important people at the heart of this crime – the victims – many still waiting for justice.

“This pattern will be repeated in the present day unless change happens.”

The National Crime Agency (NCA) will carry out a nationwide operation targeting people who have sexually exploited children, and follow up on an estimated more than 1,000 cold cases where no one was convicted.

The gangs’ harrowing crimes have typically targeted children, mainly girls, as young as 10, some of whom were in care, had physical or mental disabilities, or who had already suffered neglect or abuse.

Baroness Casey’s review looked at around a dozen live investigations into grooming gangs, and found “a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK.”

The Home Secretary has pledged to exclude convicted sex offenders from the asylum system.

The Government has accepted her recommendation that any adult man who has penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 will face a mandatory rape charge.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: “Baroness Casey confirms these sickening crimes were deliberately covered up because those in authority were more concerned about so-called community relations than about protecting young girls.

“This is sickening. Those responsible for covering this up must be prosecuted for misconduct in public office.

“The report confirms that a disproportionate number of perpetrators where of Pakistani origin and that people who downplay the ethnicity of perpetrators are letting down victims.

“This is exactly what Keir Starmer did by smearing campaigners and people like me as ‘far right’ for calling for the very inquiry he has now been forced to agree to. Starmer should apologise.

“I am also deeply troubled to read that “a significant proportion of these cases involve non-UK nationals and asylum seekers.”